SOCIETY
Trash crackdown launched
The Taipei City Government’s Department of Environmental Protection said stricter patrols on illegal trash disposal would be enforced at 341 sites in the city before the Lunar New Year holiday, when cleaning up the house is a custom, with violators facing fines of up to NT$2,400. The department said in a press release that according to statistics, 341 trash cans in particular are often overflowing with household refuse. Most of the sites (81) are located in Wanhua District (萬華), while Wenshan (文山) and Tatung (大同) districts have the smallest number, with 14 sites each. The price of a regulation 5 liter trash bag is only NT$2.25, so if people are caught illegally disposing of their garbage and are fined NT$2,400, it is equivalent to buying one bag a day for three years, the department said.
SOCIETY
Bridge named after vendor
A new bridge in Taitung City will be named after Chen Shu-chu (陳樹菊), a local vegetable vendor who made Time magazine’s 2010 list of the world’s 100 most influential people for her acts of philanthropy, in the hope that others will follow her example, the Taitung County Government said yesterday. In May last year, the county government decided to tear down Fengli Bridge and construct a new, larger bridge to relieve traffic congestion. After reviewing suggestions submitted by the public, Taitung County Commissioner Justin Huang (黃健庭) decided to name the new overpass Shuchu Bridge to honor Chen’s spirit of generosity. “Are you sure? I didn’t donate any money toward the bridge,” Chen said when Huang visited her to ask for her consent. Huang said that it was very rare for a person from Taitung to become renowned internationally. The new bridge is scheduled
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read: